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How can a man who was never born father a son? When the ghost of his genes lives on in the DNA of his brother, genetics researchers have found.
A 34-year-old U.S. man is the first ever reported case of a paternity test fooled by a human “chimera” — someone with extra genes absorbed from a nascent twin lost in early pregnancy.
About one-in-eight single childbirths are thought to have started as multiple pregnancies. Cells from these miscarried siblings are sometimes absorbed in the womb by a surviving twin, but are only rarely discovered by surprises such as the paternity test puzzle.
“Even geneticists are blown away by this,” Barry Starr, a geneticist at Stanford University, told BuzzFeed News.
A Washington couple came to Starr, who runs the “Ask a Geneticist” website at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California looking for help with what appeared to be a mistake at a fertility clinic. The answer to their mystery points to a possible genetic loophole in standard paternity testing, Starr said, “one where we have no idea how big the problem is.”
In June of 2014, the parents (who have chosen to remain unnamed because of concerns for their privacy and confidentiality of medical records) had a son with the help of fertility clinic procedures. The boy was born healthy, but strangely, his blood type didn’t match that of his parents.
An at-home paternity test suggested an explanation: The man wasn’t actually the father of the child.
Read full, original post: This Man Failed A Paternity Test Due To His Vanished Twin’s DNA
